Tuesday, August 06, 2024
Scramble Along
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), "New Poor-Law," Essays on Politics and Society (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022), pp. 72-76 (at 73-74):
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In brief, ours is a world requiring only to be well let alone. Scramble along, thou insane scramble of a world, with thy pope’s tiaras, king’s mantles and beggar’s gabardines, chivalry-ribbons and plebeian gallows-ropes, where a Paul shall die on the gibbet and a Nero sit fiddling as imperial Cæsar; thou art all right, and shalt scramble even so; and whoever in the press is trodden down, has only to lie there and be trampled broad:—Such at bottom seems to be the chief social principle, if principle it have, which the Poor-Law Amendment Act has the merit of courageously asserting, in opposition to many things. A chief social principle which this present writer, for one, will by no manner of means believe in, but pronounce at all fit times to be false, heretical and damnable, if ever aught was!The press is of course the wine-press, in which the grapes are trampled.
